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Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Renaissance Society of America
- Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2008
- pp. 325-369
- Article
- Additional Information
The magnificence with which the Florentine Renaissance is synonymous derived its power from a virtue elucidated and disseminated by influential preachers as early as the 1420s. Most notably, Sant’ Antonino Pierozzi O.P. — preacher, reformer, confidant of Cosimo de’ Medici, and eventually the city’s archbishop — drew on and creatively adapted the language of Aquinas and others to forge a public theology of magnificence apposite to the needs of his city and consonant with its republican values. This was well before the mid-1450s and the treatise of Timoteo Maffei which thus far has been the focus of scholarly attention.